iPhone app hacks colorblindness

The iPhone is already famous for its ability to do a whole lot of stuff, especially with add-ons and what not, but security researcher Dan Kaminsky has other ideas this time around – to develop a fix for faulty photoreceptors in one’s eyes. In other words, an iPhone app that is capable of processing images to fix them for those who “suffer” (that’s too heavy a word methinks) from colorblindness. The iPhone’s camera will feed in images to the display in real time, but in between that, the images will be tweaked thanks to a collection of changeable color-shifting schemes from which the user can choose.

For example, the most basic HueQuantize will exaggerate both red and green and moves them further to the extremes of the color spectrum, away from the indistinguishable middle ground where colorblind users get stuck. The DanKam app as it is known will retail for $3 in the iTunes app store and Android Marketplace, while those rocking to BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and Nokia handsets can wait for their corresponding versions in due time. Now, if only there was an app for strong passwords…